- Will Noon
The spectre of betrayal spreads across our land like the foul odor of a skunk, that comes first as a faint but decidedly unpleasant hint carried on the breezes. But with every gentle zephyr, that hint grows rapidly until it becomes a jarring assault that threatens to overwhelm our very senses.
Our first impulse is to close the windows tightly and hope that the invading stench will dissipate and soon go away completely.
But then we realize that skunks have crawled into the crawl space beneath our home through a breach in the foundation.
The breach in the foundation of our home was not one made entirely by the skunks.
They, being excellent excavators, merely enlarged the opportunity they found to enter.
The breach started as one of many small cracks in the solid concrete foundation that our house had been securely placed upon by it’s builders.
We knew of those cracks and even observed the weathering of those cracks by the fierce winds and pounding rains that always assault the houses of men.
We watched the weathering process turn a crack into a hole, which in turn allowed the winds and rains to enter as a trickle and later a flood. We noticed the ants and spiders and other insects that established a beachhead as they invaded the space enclosed by our foundation.
Many years passed by during which we always found an excuse to not seal the breaches.
Oh, we did spray some insect poison around the entrances on several occasions, but times were changing and our life was good, and we deserved to live it to the fullest.
No time for holes in foundations.
Our family was growing, our responsibilities at work were increasing as was our pay. But we began to notice on a vague level that even as our income continued to grow at a fairly regular rate, and although we could discern no immediate nor appreciable threats to our way of life, that things just didn’t seem to be as good as they were “in the good ol’ days" before the skunks moved in.”
The holes in the foundation were put out of mind as were concerns that our taxes and the prices we paid for food and clothing for our family and the necessities of life seemed to always be one step ahead of our income.
Soon, the hole in our foundation, which had over time become multiple holes, didn’t seem to press upon our consciousness quite so hard nor demand our immediate attention nearly as bad as all the other holes that were appearing in the very fabric of our life.
So for a long time even the mice, and then the rats that invaded the crawl space weren’t noticed.
Nor did we pay much attention as government became ever more intrusive from the community level and local property taxes, to the state and federal governments with their never ending laws and regulations that were always enacted to keep us safe, often from threats that we had previously been completely unaware of.
They said the regulations would make us more secure, and our lives more convenient as we would be relieved from many of the duties of citizenship. They would even relieve us of responsibility for our families education and welfare.
They helped us to find redress from those inequities and conflicts that always occur when couples grow into families, and families into communities, and communities into states, and a nation comes together from the union of those states.
They even offered redress of social inequities that none of us had ever thought about until we were informed by angry people from outside our families and our communities how unfair our way of life was.
But by now the skunks had firmly established their home in the foundation of our home.
We were told that the dictates of compassion, compromise, and tolerance bade us to embrace the skunks as neighbors.
Perhaps if we stopped calling them skunks it would help. They resemble kittens, let’s call them kittens.
But kittens don’t make our homes unlivable. They don’t force us to abandon our homes to them.
A skunk is a skunk, is a skunk!
A skunk will always agree to share your home if you are agreeable to the arrangement. Of course, they set the terms of the agreement by their very nature.
We have a nation that we have given over to skunks!
They inhabit the White House, our Congress and our courts. They have substantial control of our schools from kindergarten through college. They inhabit our places of commerce.
They increasingly tell us to relinquish our homes, our religion, our families, our jobs, and our ethical standards because all of these offend them.
And it is all based on a lie. They say, “We don’t stink!” Can you smell them yet?
